#a storyboard that doesnt tell much lol

[sweeneydino]

When you make sketches just to get an idea for a plot in a story you're trying to finish

I'm really the one running from the dark with the way I'm running for some sort of inspiration to finish this stuff, stg.

[lambment]

Hello! I love your art so much! Your cult of the lamb stuff has really inspired me and has pumped me up and I’m trying to basically re learn how to draw again! Do you have any advice for a fellow artist and how to approach story telling? :D

anon its been like a good while since this message has been sent (I think? based off all the homophobic crown asks this was wedged btwn) and WAHHH im so happy for you, I hope youre enjoying your reentry into art C:

first and foremost, try to enjoy the process rather than the end result. a much wordier explanation in this post (X)

theres also the discipline aspect of it, you need to be pretty concious of balancing learning with enjoyment (and you can absolutley have that balance without thinking about it). but I find a lot of new/learning artists get easily discouraged when a piece doesnt pop out exactly how they imagined it. I have a secret, lets be realistic, none of my pieces do lol. expectation is the killer of art imo, just go with the flow of enjoyment and learn what you can to become better at it. get used to adapting often.

even if you arent always studying (dont make it boring for yourself now), just you constantly drawing will improve your art, but dont expect to notice an improvment with every piece, its an incremental process and youll have bad days. just focus on the journey not the destination is what im getting at.

REFERENCE!!! its a beautiful, beautiful thing, anyone telling you its cheating is a silly billy who needs to learn. look up artists you admire, try to figure out how they tackle a piece, examine photos that you think are beautiful. just collect different pieces of reference, and try making a piece based off of them, a fun excercise. it'll improve your art.

as for the story aspect of this, im ngl, Im still learning myself. my main rule of thumb is "if i want to see this, someone else out there will too." so dont get discouraged by thinking no one will want to see your story idea.

I'm constantly adding story ideas to my notes to save for later, idk bout you, but I WILL forget the idea if I dont write it down immediatley (built worse), and if you have a mental image of it make sure to add very vague stage direction to supplement it, dont get too detailed tho, youll be changing alot. if youre anything like me -pepaw brained- try to keep in the habit of that. some storyboarding tips for staging tips and reference (X)

from there, I'll take a key moment -money shot or emotional moment- of the story, and base the rest of the comic around that image -> how I tackle formatting and making a comic (X).

the best way to learn is by doing, and failing and learning from that. so dont sike yourself out when you get there and it doesnt turn out as expected, it might be something so much better, thats the fun of it (:

I hope this helped, sorry im a yapper!

[mudshadow]

tips on making a pmv?

well kind of a big question! lol

uhh Im not sure if it really counts as tips but Ill walk thru my process of making ALSTF and point out a couple diff things I did compared to goddess and some of my other past videos

definitely the biggest thing to get down on paper is the storyboard. I dont start finalizing or doing much cleaning up until I have all the necessary points boarded and ideally slapped into a video so you can see it w the audio. it doesnt have to look good and it helps you figure out the flow of it esp in case of something that you thought would work in your head but you can see it might not once you get it out of your system. I failed to do this particularly with my to be alone pmv (mostly bc my workflow was much different back then) and if I were to make that video again these days, Id really like to board and probably reboard the whole second half of it bc I dont think it flows as well as I thought it would when I saw it in my minds eye

past the storyboard I will admit it's pretty daunting to just kinda... start. I particularly actually avoided starting work on the first shot OR the first piece of character art that would show up in the video FIRST bc. I did do most of my shots for goddess sequentially and Idk if my viewers do but I find it very obvious to pick out where I started getting tired with all of it (mostly w the backgrounds but Im applying this to both character art and bgs). so I bugged a group chat of mine for a random number between 1 and 15 (the amount of shots I divided ALSTF into) and ended up starting somewhere in the middle. plus it's pretty motivating getting a friend to tell you to work on that shot even if they dont know theyre telling you that LOL

I think my biggest piece of advice is once you get into the meat of it, if you feel like doing linework you should do linework. if you feel like colouring you should colour. if you wanna paint a bg you should paint a bg. if you wanna edit you should edit. I didnt do this for goddess and instead made myself do everything in stages (storyboard > line EVERYTHING > colour EVERYTHING > shade EVERYTHING > etc etc) and would get super bored of doing the same thing over and over and thats part of why I think it's obvious to see where I got tired w that video. I was much looser with my process for ALSTF which really helped break it up when things got a bit monotonous

actually. one last piece of advice, it's super important to try to keep all your files organized lol. this seems obvious but the last thing you wanna do when youre in the flow of editing is having to go dig around in a bunch of nonsensically named files bc you accidentally misplaced or misnamed a characters ear you planned on tweening or smth. use a bunch of folders. separate your shots. come up w a naming convention that works for you. it's super worth it lmao

[jacfletch]

on the dnd thing. sacha seems like he'd drive straight in and drag jac in whether or not she wants to be there. idk whether he'd be like 'but i made you a character! and she's connected to mine! look how cool she is!' or if he'd just drag her along and wait for her to get so annoyed at everyone else's rp choices that she has to step in so there's some common sense present and they don't all die five sessions in. everyone would get really emotionally involved in it but pretend they weren't.

no wait funnier dnd thing: do they stick to a groupchat for updates for the sake of the oldies or do they start a discord and it turns into complete chaos at the speed of light. (and maybe fletch has a little bit of experience with dnd because he has kids? idk spitballing because we all need some happiness and i'm reminiscing the last time you somehow storyboarded an entire plot arc on here kjhjsk)

would loveeee if maybe fletch heard chloe, nicky & dom talking about it and kinda knows what it is cos like you said hes got kids, but chloe & nicky politely tell him that he can’t join their campaign bc its “hard with too many people” (really they just dont want him to join) so hes like “fine i can do one myself” and ange joins because she loves to annoy chloe and if chloe doesnt want her to or thinks ange is “too old” for dnd then shes obviously going to do it. and fletch asks sacha who obviously LOVES the idea and theyre both like “so bring jac but dont tell her about it, we want her there but she might not come if she knows what it is” so sacha creates a character for her and maybe he makes his character & hers like. siblings OR he makes her a really cool, hot, evil character and shes like “i hate this....but i love this.....” fletch also asks donna if she wants to join but she turns them down because shes already in the “younger” group and fletch is kinda dragging his heals a bit because he doesnt think that either ric or hanssen is gonna wanna join (if it’s pre-essie dying, he’s asking her tho) but he reluctantly asks them anyway because he wants more people. hanssen says “absolutely, ive been playing dnd since the 80s” and ric agrees because fletch reminds him that he doesnt have much else going on. its a MESS bc ange and fletch are just trying to have fun while hanssen is trying to stay strictly to the rules and also jac loves to cause chaos and it makes sacha & ric laugh so they indulge it

BUT i do think theres a groupchat btwn the 2 groups because even though hanssen has a background and knows probably the most, fletch cant help but text the “younger” group about how to play, whats acceptable & whats not, what certain spells and actions do, etc etc so nicky adds everyone to the same group so that everyone can know whats going on at once but of COURSE as you say it becomes instantly chaotic lol

[tumblunni]

Oh man I NEVER EVEN KNEW about ‘overshooting’! you dont even notice it in the game but wow that explains why the skullgirls attack animations seem to hit a lot harder than most fighting games. Like seriously, just a split second of one fist going cartoonishly big at the end and then snapping back to normal. Its amazing that its the snapback that does it, not even the exaggeration! It can be such a small size increase, or even just a darkened outline or a move continuing forward further than the actual moment of impact. Like a lil slide after they come back down, but before they jump back into the default position. SO FASCINATING!!! And there was a really cool example from street fighter of a character’s sleeve poofing up when they punch, and then flowing back down, to give the same impression!

And how going off model is necessary for good animation! Silly looking smears are completely fine as long as it leads to a fluid animation. She literally calls it ‘breaking the body’, and encourages you to abandon anatomy for the biggest impact keyframe. “You don’t have to make every frame look perfect, you’re creating one piece of movement, not individual pieces of art.”

Its really interesting to hear how they like.. do animation as the last stage. Well, they do the animation but they dont.. complete drawing it? They make a playable build using their storyboard sketches, and then later their lineart animation, and etc. And they playtest it each time and send notes back on anything that looks wrong while in motion, so they can catch it early and save a lot of wasted work. Thats such a simple yet effective ay to do it! I can’t believe i never thought of it!

Also i really admire that miss cartwright says she’s very nervous giving the presentation, and generally has a very personable honest friendly attitude. I mean, you can tell she’s just a normal person and she may be good at animation but that doesnt mean she could do this presentation effortlessly. It seems like she put a LOT of work into practising for this, and it really paid off! None of this stuff would be so fascinating if it wasnt delivered so well in a really accessable sort of teaching style!

Holding frames at different intervals can make a huge difference, wow! She does say how its super important to work within your hardware and to your boss’s specifications though, some games arent lucky enough to actually be able to have variable framerates. But WOW, Skullgirls looks so much better with it! She showed an example of one of cerebella’s moves, and how it doesn’t read very well at all when every frame goes by at equal speed. It just looks like.. well, if you wave a ruler back and forth? It looks like one wiggly squiggly arch rather than emphasizing what actual movement is happening. When stuff is that fast, you need to remember that the human eye isnt gonna take in the detail of every single frame, so you need to slow down or otherwise emphasize the bits that’re important to the move. Plus also, having an equal framerate means that smear frames can be too SLOW, and be more easily visible, thus breaking immersion! So in the final version the smears run faster than the rest, and the frames at the start and end are slowed down. (when she’s raring up for the attack, and once her fist actually clenches and grabs the foe)

Again, I had NO CLUE that ‘hitstop’ was even a thing! The technical term for the sort of ‘slow motion after the impact’ thing. Its not usually as extreme as it is in the end of boss battles in Kingdom Hearts, for example, usually its more like just two miliseconds of the enemy staying in their downed pose before falling to the ground and bouncing back up. Again, its about speedup and slowdown to emphasize impact! If you just leave the game’s programming as-is and don’t bother to account for this, you have characters recovering from the hit too fast and it doesnt even look like it hurt. I think this is probably related to the concept of ‘mercy invincibility’, too? Thats kinda a way to give the PLAYER a moment to react to the attack!

Another really interesting tip- the reason why games snap back to the idle animation! She says its actually very bad to animate in-betweens of a character returning to their idle pose, snapping back is way better. It doesnt interrupt the idle, and you don’t have to think about animating a return pose that fits equally well with every different attack. plus it slows down combat cos the player cant immediately attack as soon as they’re back on their feet. overly long recovery animations can lead to a character thats disproportionally weak to getting stunlocked! Plus it just gives a sense of speed and badassery to a fighter who can flow so seamlessly back into the action.

I also like that she talked about the things she wasn’t happy with in her work, and used them as teaching examples. That takes a lot of self confidence to be able to talk about! I’ve gotta agree with her, that less frames is snappier sometimes. Its not always about looking the most artistic, in a videogame stuff has to be speedy enough to match with the limits of the action. And I loved the bit where she showed how completely 100% even frame amounts can make stuff have less impact, how removing just one frame from the fist buildup made a punch attack so much better looking!

A funny anecdote: apparantly they went a bit overboard with the first attempt at jiggle physics. They had the problem of too many frames in an idle animation, ENTIRELY because of the boobs! So lol, its nice to know they put the effort into making everything look more realistic and actiony, even the silly fanservice bits.

Oh and at the end she reccommends some sites that archive fighting game animation sheets! Even professionals still love playing and researching other games for reference! zweifuss.ca and fightersgeneration.com